October 5, 2012

These results are based upon nightly interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. As a result, only about one-third of the interviews for today’s update were conducted after the presidential debate. The single night of polling conducted after the debate did show some improvement for Romney, but it remains to be seen whether that will continue or if it was merely statistical noise. Sunday morning’s update will be the first national polling based entirely upon post-debate interviews.

Some improvement... but not enough to round up to a difference in the reported percentages.

The 7.8% unemployment rate update (for all the cooking and shaking it took to get that number) is going to throw a bunch of cold water over the debate results too, so I expect the next few daily tracking polls to not show a lot of movement.

I'm becoming somewhat indifferent with respect to the prospect of another Obama term anyway. If the majority of the electorate thinks the country is better off continuing on its present path then what to do but roll with it.

I've accumulated enough diversified wealth that in five or ten years I can uproot and find someplace more amenable to reside once things go to pot here and the government looks to even greater portion of my earnings to pay for its financial negligence. It's painful to say because I love my country but it appears a large segment of it wants a leader who is hell bent on tearing it down.

Until about last month or so, I would hang up on pollsters. Now I stick with them and complete the poll. I'm not exactly sure why I changed, but it now seems more important to let them know my opinion.

ColAngus, i was robopolled by Rasmussen, "Do I watch Major League Baseball?". Like Virginia with Santa Claus, I now Believe that polling exists.

Of course , "If you see it in the Sun, it must be so" is now just a quaint little anachronism. The fact that Romney did well in the debate will be quickly doused by the MSM with job numbers, and when foreign policy comes to town, Romney's response will be touted as worse than Obama's.

I blame Romney for this, because a republican has to be like Chris Christie to the press to break through. Pres. Obama can just look presidential and get by. He has before and he will again.

Last night on PBS, they quoted Romney as saying he would not accept a tax reform bill that gave the rich a break and raised taxes on the middle class, and the reporters still questioned how he can achieve that. A Veto pen comes to mind, but that is not in the MSM playbook to give him any credit.

If Romney wins, Obamacare is in jeopardy, and the MSM will not let that prize be taken away.

Garage: The pure unemployment rate is a terrible indicator of anything. It doesn't include people have given up looking for work, it counts the underemployed as employed, etc. It has always been a pretty terrible measure of employment. Really, when people losing hope makes the unemployment situation look BETTER, that's a bad thing.

You would know this if you remembered back to about 2005, when this was Common Wisdom, and Bush's "real unemployment" was nefariously high.

Colonel Angus said: "If the majority of the electorate thinks the country is better off continuing on its present path then what to do but roll with it."

The American people cannot say they do not know what will happen in a second term. Obama has revealed himself as being without commitment to our republican form of government. He will tolerate no impediments to his left-wing agenda. If the American are ready to surrender what we have inherited, then the rest of us are screwed.

"I've accumulated enough diversified wealth that in five or ten years I can uproot and find someplace more amenable to reside once things go to pot here"

You think they'll let you leave with your wealth. Recall the scene in "The Lost City" when the authorities take from Andy Garcia even his father's pocket watch as he escapes Cuba. We're already have the beginnings Third-World currency controls.

"Soooo....Am I to believe that Romney didn't bounce after the debate??"

-- It only includes one day of polling, so we won't see a bounce until another day or so (it is being held even by the two days of pre-debate polling.) We can't say there was or was not a bounce until later. Well, we could have said there WAS a bounce if Romney's numbers skyrocketed, but that did not happen. So, it may just be taking awhile for people to process/sampling, etc.

“It is part of a frantic effort by the Romney campaign to catch President Barack Obama on the ground in Ohio, perhaps the most critical of states and a place where retail politicking still works. While Romney has 36 campaign offices in Ohio, Obama has 96. Romney and the state GOP have an estimated 130 staffers. Obama has what his state communications director said were “hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers.” Romney started his general election campaigning in May and opened his first Ohio office in early June (he closed the Dublin Street headquarters after he won the primary). Obama for America has been in the state, basically, for five years.”

And "trying" is the operative word. I don't give out my cell number, and numbers that aren't in my contacts are almost never answered. And if I do happen to pick up, I'm not participating in an extended conversation. Which is one of many reasons why poll results mostly just bubble around in the background noise.

Garage: Not quite. The point is that there is nuance. For example, the unemployment data went down because previously retired people/people who didn't need work (stay at homers, etc.) were economically pressured into taking part time/poor paying jobs. So, that effectively raised the amount of people working without actually lowering the number of people out of work. So, it is a -good- number, but it isn't a magical necklace of proof against Romney.

"Some improvement... but not enough to round up to a difference in the reported percentages."

Though I don't know the numbers, if the prior three-days had been exactly:

Obama 49, Romney 47Obama 49, Romney 47Obama 49, Romney 47

And if overnight, the polls shifted to exactly Obama 48, Romney 48,

The three day average would be Obama 48.67, Romney 47.33, which after rounding would indicate no change. However, were these hypothetical numbers to hold, by the second day, the results would be rounded to a tie.

Now that Romney claims what he said about the 47% was completely wrong, I think the general public realizes that he will say anything to get elected, a man with little core, and the number of folks who will support him, for various reasons, will stay about the same. It will be a close election, but Obama will probably hold a slim lead.

Matthew Sablan, the unemployment number published by media also does not include people who are unemployed and have run out of unemployment benefits. That seems to be a contributor to this month's drop.

I think it is interesting that if a politician admits they misspoke, we should assume that means he has no core and is a terrible human being. You know, for having the humility for accepting he made a mistake. Why is that never the lesson we take away when Obama admits to mistakes?

Romney should pick up some "undecideds" from the debate. It is doubtful that he pick up those committed already to Obama. It is doubtful that those who are not already committed to Obama will vote for Obama if Romney establishes himself as a legitimate alternative, he will get the undecideds.

In 2004, Kerry was never able to convince undecideds that Kerry was a legitimate alternatve when it came to managing the Iraq and WOT. That is why Kerry lost.

We can't believe any numbers coming out of the government. Especially numbers from the famously "non-partisan" Congressional Budget Office. They are told to score bills based on specific criteria given to them by Congress and they can't consider any other criteria that actually might affect the score.

There's always some agenda with numbers from the government. Some attempt at control of the populace. So I don't trust any numbers given by them.

Actually, that's not correct. The Margin of Error only takes into account the size of the sample compared to the size of the total population. However, it assumes that the method of choosing that sample does not introduce any systematic bias.

If the method of choosing the sample does introduce a systematic bias ( and it always does ) then that error is in addition to the MOE.

It may not change. Statistically, half the nation is above 100 IQ and half below. The only votes up for grabs are the people who don't use their IQ at all, and are waiting to feel their emotions on election day. I suggest last minute ads with lots of puppies and kittens...being eaten or strapped to cars.

They're going all out now, in every possible direction. This is their last chance to institute the 'dreams of their fathers' for real. Those fathers being Bill Ayers, Howard Zinn and all the other neo-Maoist hipsters.

Stay tuned to see just how much farther the greatest college student prank the world has ever seen will go.

Those Weathermen sure are a hoot! Putting a cop car on the roof or something like that just wasn't big enough for them.

shiloh said... hmm, Obama's plethora of small donors as opposed to Willard's billionaire well which has run dry!

This is why Obama sends out requests for $3 donations, to create a talking point for his rubes. It's quite revealing to watch them try to pass it off as meaningful content. It shows they don't have any actually meaningful content to support their candidate.

It's interesting most cons and libertarians are voting for Romney because they understand while he's a moderate Obama's policies will set America on a course of less economic success for the foreseeable future, and that while a 1-3 point difference in growth seems small over a lifetime it generates a difference the magnitude of that between America and the now defunct USSR, and while lefties are happy to condemn our grandchildren to poverty the rest of us consider ourselves stewards of future generations and disrespectfully refuse.

Fixed that for you.

A while back you whined that Meade wouldn't "debate" you. You do know you can't "debate" juvenile insults, right? So you'd first have to make a comment of substance.

No, we can count. You can't. Conservatives have been pointing out that fact for awhile.

If you take Obama's "I've added 4 million jobs (cough cough ... after losing 4.3 million ... cough cough)" at value.

To keep up with population growth we needed AT LEAST 5.5 million jobs created in that time. That is over 1.5 million new people that still need jobs. And it doesn't even consider the 4+ million hole at the start.

if labor force participation had held even since January (when it was 8.3 percent), the jobless rate would be 8.4 percent. If the job participation rate were the same as when Barack Obama took office, the rate would be 10.7 percent. The broader U-6 rate (unemployed plus total employed part time for economic reasons) held steady at 14.7 percent.

Rasmussen is a 3 day average and it has 1 day post debate and 2 days of pre debate data. Obama also gets a weekend bounce for some reason with Rasmussen. So we have to wait until about Wednesday of next week to really see how things are.

Gallup's tracking poll is a 7 day average so we won't see the full impact of the debate until next week, too.